Dinneen, Frank Brazil (1863–1916), GAA president, proprietor of Croke Park, and journalist, was born in Ballylanders, Co. Limerick, son of Nicholas Dinneen of Ballylanders. In the early 1880s he was one of the leading sprinters in the Munster area and regularly competed at meetings organised by the IAAA. After the foundation of the GAA (1884) he was at the centre of a conflict between the rival organisations for his loyalties. His presence at the first ever GAA athletics meeting in Blarney (3 May 1885), at which he won the 100-yd sprint and the high jump, was trumpeted as a major coup for the association. He competed at a number of meetings thereafter but soon retired to become a leading official, first in Limerick and then on the GAA central council in Dublin. For more than two decades he was a powerful administrator of the GAA, managed many of its athletics meetings, and was its chief handicapper for much of this period.
In the battle for control of the GAA in 1887 between clerical and republican elements, he was prominent in the latter and was thought to have been IRB ‘centre’ for east Limerick. Throughout the splits that sundered the GAA in this period, he remained aligned to the physical-force element, but unlike many others he did not leave the association when it almost disbanded after the fall of C. S. Parnell (qv) in 1891. He was elected its vice-president (1892), president (1895), and secretary (1898) – the only person to date to have held all three positions. His various tenures were not without controversy. Along with R. T. Blake (qv), he began a modernising process within the GAA that eventually brought it unrivalled prosperity, but the relationship ended in acrimony (1898) when Dineen had Blake removed from the secretaryship. In a vicious pamphlet Blake denounced Dineen, saying that Dineen was only interested in his salary, and made a series of allegations accusing Dineen of forgery, packing meetings, using the GAA to pay for his lifestyle, and pocketing gate receipts. Blake's challenge to Dineen to counter these with a libel suit was not met, and it was later acknowledged by a leading GAA official that Blake had been harshly treated. Although Dinneen left the secretary's position in 1901, he later served (1906–9) as the first president of the GAA's athletic council (whose establishment he proposed in 1905), and was involved in arranging a team to attend a sports meeting in Rome to celebrate Pope Pius X's jubilee in 1908. In August 1908 in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, he refereed the legendary contest between T. F. Kiely (qv) and Martin Sheridan (qv), accepted as the leading all-round athletes in the world, which ended in a tie.
In that same year he purchased the City and Suburban Sports Ground at Jones's Rd, Dublin, for £3,250 from the Butterly family. He set about restoring the dilapidated facility and erected terracing as well as re-laying the pitch. He was paid £10 per meeting staged there by the GAA, but by 1910 was forced to sell four acres of the fourteen-acre site to the Jesuits of Belvedere College for £1,090. In November 1913 the GAA bought the ground from him for £3,500 and renamed it Croke Park.
Through this period he was a leading sports journalist in Dublin, working with the Freeman's Journal, Sport, and the Evening Telegraph. In 1900 he had joined Sport where his column ‘Gaelic fields’ was a regular feature and was testimony to his reputation as the leading expert on athletics in the country. This was evident also in his 1906 publication Irish athletic record, the first list of Irish athletics championship winners at home and abroad. He remained connected with the GAA but was seen as a difficult, unpopular figure, and his administration is regarded as having been corrupt, motivated by personal and political interest. He had been imprisoned in the early 1880s for unlawful association and obstructing the police. There were constant allegations that his involvement in the GAA served to facilitate his republican activities, and after the foundation of the Irish National Brotherhood (1895) he became one of its paid organisers. In his later years, however, he became entirely cynical about politics and, despite frequent references to his previous radicalism, he appeared on platforms at parades of the National Volunteers (after the split in October 1914 within the Irish Volunteers). He used his friendship with John Redmond (qv) and other leaders of the nationalist party to arrange a meeting with British government officials for GAA officials, with whom he travelled to London (April 1916) to secure GAA exemption from a proposed entertainments' tax. He died suddenly within a week of that meeting, on 18 April 1916.